Vol. 11, Issue 11 (2022)

The present study revealed the gene action and inheritance of yield and different yield attributing characters in bitter gourd. Six generations including P₁ (DBGS-2) and P₂ (Pusa Purvi), F₁, F₂, back cross 1 and back cross 2, were subjected to the generation mean analysis, scaling and joint scaling test. The results showed the presence of positive and significant additive effect (d) for the traits like days taken to first lateral, leaf length and width, peduncle length, pericarp thickness, seed number per fruit and yield. Among the two parents, DBGS-2 was observed as the higher yielding (25.86 tonne/ ha). Among the three inter-allelic interactions, the additive × additive [i] was observed significant for the traits like number of primary branches (2.71±1.21), leaf width (2.48±0.30), peduncle length (2.72±0.33), seed number per fruit (12.20±1.20) and yield (38.75±3.82). The duplicate type of epistasis was the observed as the predominant type for various traits studied. The correlation analysis revealed that yield was having significant, positive correlation with peduncle length (0.295) and seed number per fruit (0.269). It was observed that yield is a polygenic and complex trait, governed by many genes in a cumulative manner showing both additive and non-additive gene interaction.